Xi Jinping’s determination to tackle China’s social inequalities was one of the most trumpeted elements of his marathon three-and-a-half-hour presidential address at this year’s Communist party congress.

Less well reported, however, is that inequality in the world’s most populous nation has already been falling since 2008. Moreover, the fall is part of a broader, though far from universal, trend that has seen income inequality decline across emerging markets, led by Latin America, historically the most unequal region on earth.

Since the early 2000s, income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has fallen significantly in all of the 16 Latin American countries for which the World Bank has a reasonable run of data (it has nothing for Venezuela since 2006).